Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting. Voyager 1 is on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles from Earth, so it takes almost two days for engineers to uplink a command and get a response. The spacecraft suddenly stopped transmitting intelligible data in November. Engineers eventually found the issue, which was in the system responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth. A single chip responsible for storing a portion of memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware.
Friday, April 26, 2024